Racial Prejudice against the Halfcastes in Australia in Xavier Herbert’s Novel “Capricornia.”

Abstract

This final project is aimed at analyzing racial prejudice against the half-castes are existing in Xavier Herbert’s novel “Capricornia.” What are the causes and the effects of racial prejudice and how are the reactions of half-castes towards racial prejudice? The object of the study is Herbert’s novel “Capricornia.” The data of the study are in the form of explicit sentences and written dialogues. The data of this study are collected by doing the following steps: reading the novel carefully for many times, identifying the data related to racial prejudice, inventorizing the data, classifying the data, simplifying the data, selecting the data, and at last reporting the data into appendixes. There are several techniques to analyze the data. They are exposing, explaining, interpreting, and the last one is summarizing. The interpretation and the explanation are done from the point of view of sociological approach. The result of this study shows that there are many racial prejudice conflicts among the characters. The racial prejudice arises because of individual and societal aspects. Besides, the racial prejudice is also found in many sectors and has bad effects toward half-castes such as antilocution, avoidance, discrimination, physical attack, and extermination. Half-caste is someone of mixed racial descent. They are minority group and they often get those bad effects from whites. Therefore, they give some reactions towards whites who practice racial prejudice, such as submission, withdrawal, avoidance, and integration. Finally this study is expected to give more knowledge and understanding about racial prejudice.